Hydria (Water Jar)

Created by an artist known as the Leningrad Painter, the front of this vessel shows a young couple embracing as three other young women look on. Intimate scenes of couples kissing are unusual in Greek art, especially for women of the Athenian upper class, indicating that the participants depicted here are probably courtesans known as hetairai. Under the foot is an incised letter - upsilon, lambda or gamma - presumably a very simple trader’s mark. This vase is decorated in the red-figure technique. Invented in Athens around 530 BCE, the red-figure technique reverses the decorative black-figure scheme. While both techniques applied a gloss, or slip made from refined clay, to all areas intended to be black, the figures here are now reserved, or left in the color of the clay, which was then intensified by the application of an orange overwash. Barely discernible are sketch marks, as well as lines of thicker gloss outlining the contours of the figures. The drapery, jewelry, and anatomy are rendered in gloss that is diluted and therefore thinner. Except for the bands of decoration—for example, the egg motif at the rim, the ivy band around the neck, and the meander pattern below the figural scene—the rest of the vase was coated with gloss. It was so thinly applied in some places that the marks of the brush are visible. Red and white details were sometimes added, and the undecorated portions of the vase were coated with gloss. They were fired in the same process as black-figure vases.